politics, theory, action

Posts categorized "Books"

September 07, 2017

In Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire, Kurt Andersen spends several paragraphs trashing me. He attacks my 1998 book, Aliens in America and then adds some red-baiting for the win. But rather than providing evidence of some kind of leftist contempt for reason, what he proves is that he either can't read or is a liar.

First: he says I was "delighted on principle" to "defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees." What I actually say is that "the advocatory conventions of the UFO discourse have expanded to defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees." The paragraph is describing the ways that UFO discourse in the 1980s differs from that in the 1960s. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were scientific and governmental investigations of UFOs that had a degree of legitimacy. For example, there was a Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects held by the House Science and Astronautics Committee in July 1968. In 1966 Gerald Ford wrote a letter to the House Armed Services Committee criticizing the Air Force for dismissing a bunch of Michigan sitings. Likewise in the 50s and 60s, most UFO researchers wanted to keep "contactees" at arms-length. Their claims were considered too wild, beyond the pale, likely hoaxes. By the eighties, the kinds of methods and testimonies prominent in UFO research had changed. Hypnosis was used to recover memories said to be memories of abduction. Andersen either can't read for context (including an entire sentence), doesn't understand how to read a history of a changing discourse, or is deliberately taking me out of context so as to have an easy punching bag. I expect the latter (but this might be too generous -- why choose?).

Second: Andersen says I "celebrate" "every attitude and approach that appalls [sic] him." Celebrate? Aliens in America is dark, depressing, an account of the collapse of the conditions of possibility of democracy. It reads the nineties in terms of paranoia, what I will later with Zizek call the "decline of symbolic efficiency." Instead of either a postmodern embrace of a multitude of language games or a Habermasian insistence on the commensurability of languages, I accept the former as an unbearable condition that democratic theorists have failed to acknowledge. UFO belief and the UFO discourse is the example, case study, and symptom I use to make the argument. In his attack, Andersen renders as my opinion or position what is actually my description of the way UFO discourse functions. So he says I reject the presumption that there is a public anchored in reason. What I point out is that this presumption no longer holds in the US -- the fragmentation, the competing conceptions of the real, the fact that there is no set of common standards to which all agree -- is the condition we are in. My statement is descriptive, not normative. I write:

"UFO belief thus challenges the presumption that there is some 'public' that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged."

In light of the Right's failure to acknowledge climate change, this passage isn't just accurate -- it's prescient.

Third: Andersen says that I claim that the norms of public reason are "oppressive and exclusionary." Again, he takes a phrase out of context. What I write is:

"Various Marxists, feminists, and multiculturalists have stressed the importance of knowledge gained at the margins; the importance of the standpoint of the oppressed as epistemologically superior falsely disembedded view from nowhere."

I link this view to the position that one can never really know the position of another person and the conclusion that this means that we cannot and should not judge what another person claims to know or experience. Then I criticize it. Andersen attributes to me a view I explicitly criticize. I point out that the problem of multiple ways of knowing is that it is depoliticizing because it is epistemologically confused: there are no common standard, no common reality. At the end of the twentieth century, we were awash in information, with no capacity to judge or assess it because there is no general reality, common reason. The political problem is then how to deal with this absence of a symbolic order.

Fourth: Andersen fails to understand any of my points regarding links, conspiracy theory, and paranoia. I argue that in a setting marked by the absence of a common sense of reason, problems are not solved by more information or knowledge. This is because there is not an underlying truth according to which information and knowledge can be assessed. Adding more and more information thus exacerbates rather than solves problems, especially political problems. In the late nineties, this problem was associated with data glut, search engine design, problems of verification. To an extent, we've let our technologies solve it for us. But it still comes up a lot in politics, often deployed by the Right to block action: we need more information because the science of climate change isn't settled. We also sometimes use it when we don't want to accept information we don't like: a second and third and fourth opinion following a bad diagnosis. At any rate, my argument in Aliens is that under the conditions of the absence of a common reason more information will never decide for us.

Fifth: Andersen ends by pointing out that I am a communist and making a gesture to Goebbels. This is the all too conventional obfuscatory move of equating communism and Nazism. It's used by those who are weak thinkers and politically suspect. Andersen is both.

March 23, 2017

The review is critical -- so critical that the author doesn't even get the title right. Nor does he get the title right of one of my other books that he mentions.

Here is my response (fortunately, a Facebook friend was able to recover it):

Hi Luke, thanks for the thoughtful review. My 2009 book is called Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

As you know, definitions are not always useful since most of our concepts have histories. The concept of the crowd that I use comes primarily from LeBon (a temporary collective being) and is expanded via Canetti (especially with respect to the egalitarian discharge). Crowds don't have to be spontaneous; they can be organized and produced. I talk about mobs on pp. 7-8, and refer briefly to some of that literature. As I note, the 19th century opens up the discussion of whether a crowd is a mob or the people. This is a political question, a matter of struggle and debate. This struggle is always necessarily situated -- what is opened up, what is possible? Some commentators always mistrust the people, always render the crowd as a mob. Others find possibility.

I don't deconstruct the idea of individual interests because I am more interested in rejecting the individual form altogether. You write: "Dean wants to argue that intelligible interests can be attributed to collectives" -- that description doesn't ring true to me since I don't use the language of interests. Instead, with respect to the crowd I use Canetti to speak of the discharge as the moment of equality that gives the crowd its substance.

You say I don't give concrete historical examples of the party -- but chapter 3 discusses Lenin's account of the party and chapter 5 talks about experiences of members of the British and US communist parties.

Where you really misunderstand (or misrepresent) what I'm doing is when you say that "the party form, like the crowd, provides a mechanism for the individual to find meaning and reinterpret their identity." This isn't accurate because the first two chapters of the book dismantle the individual form. Even the quote from me that you use to support your point doesn't work because in the quoted passage I refer to communists in the plural. My point involves the way that the Party is a site of collective belonging that works back on the collectivity. There is no rediscovery of individuality -- the long section on Kristin Ross should make that clear. At any rate, my point is not that "its the ability to subsume individuals into a collective" that links crowd and party; it's that the party is the form that organizes fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By organizing this fidelity, it can hold open the gap opened up by the disruptive crowd event (and of course not all crowd events are disruptive).

Also, notice: it is not just participation in a crowd event that disrupts the interpellation of the subject as an individual. Rather (as chapter 1 argues), it is already the case that commanded individualism is over-burdening the fragile individual form. The extremes of contemporary capitalism are too much for individuals to bear (as I explain via the account of the changes in the individual form). So there are material reasons for the dissolution of this form today that should be understood not as pathologies (ala Turkle) but as indications of real contradictions.

I'm not sure what's at stake in your claim that I engage few contemporary authors other than predictably European ones. I'm tempted to think that you read in a different archive and I didn't refer to the people you like to read. But, the first chapter talks about a number of contemporary sociologists, I talk about Sherry Turkle, Kristin Ross, Judith Butler, John Holloway, Hardt and Negri, Eugene Holland and, yes, Althusser, Dolar, Zizek, Badiou.

You say I don't mention political science or any of the literature on parties - -there is an extensive discussion of Michels and notes to political scientists' commentary on Michels. You have a general dismissal that says looking at the literature on representation, democracy, and parties would benefit my scholarship. But you don't say how or in what way in would change my argument. It's interesting to note that by misstating the title of my 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, you actually omit reference to a book where I do engage work in democratic theory. Again, I'm left thinking that basically you are just signaling that your archive is different from mine.

You mention that I reject identity politics. You don't mention my argument -- which is that identity today is fully saturated. It can't ground a politics. The claim for or attribution of an identity tells us nothing about a person's -- or a group's -- politics. (I'll add here that my first book was Solidarity of Strangers: feminism after identity politics, 1996). I emphasize as well that "the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side."

It seems to me that you have one criticism: Dean rejects individuality. Yes, I do.

And then you end with an anti-communist gesture -- one that you link to recantations part of the history of anti-communism. But of course that does not sum or capture communism or anti-communism, so it strikes me as an odd kind of ideological signal.

February 10, 2016

CM: You were saying that the left denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?

JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.

On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.

But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places.

“I think holding on to the word ‘communism’ is useful, not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make socialists seem really, really mainstream. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what we should have at a bare minimum.”

CM: You mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?

JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.

Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.

The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.

It seems I got the title for my book The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso 2013) from reading Jodi Dean. I read her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press, 2010) in manuscript. On re-reading it, I find this: “disintegrating spectacles allow for ever more advanced forms of monitoring and surveillance.” (39) And “Debord’s claim that, in the society of the spectacle ‘the uses of media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance’ applies better to communicative capitalism as a disintegrated, networked, spectacular circuit.” (112)

I think I mean something similar by spectacle of disintegration to what Dean calls communicative capitalism, even though we read Debord a bit differently, but more on that later. After revisiting Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture in a previous blog post, Dean seemed like a logical next stop in looking back through classic works in #theory21c. I am closer to Terranova than Dean on certain points, but there are things about Dean’s work I greatly admire.

How can we even write books in the era of Snapchat and Twitter? Perhaps the book could be something like the tactic of slowing down the pace of work. Still, books are a problem for the era of communicative capitalism, which resists recombination into longer threads of argument. The contours of Dean’s argument are of a piece with this media strategy.

Dean offers “an avowedly political assessment of the present” rather than a technical one. (3) The political – a term greatly expanded in scope and connotation across a half-century of political theory – becomes the language within which to critique the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the technical. But perhaps this now calls for a kind of ‘dialectical’ compliment, a critical scrutiny of the expanded category of the political, perhaps even from the point of view of techne itself. We intellectuals do love the political, perhaps on the assumption that it is the same kind of discourse as our own.

If industrial capitalism exploited labor; communicative capitalism exploits communication. It is where “reflexivity captures creativity.” (4) Iterative loops of communication did not really lead to a realization of democratic ideals of access, inclusion, participation. On the contrary, it is an era of capture, of desire caught in a net and reduced to mere drive.

Dean draws her concepts mostly from Slavoj Zizek. Elsewhere I have arguedthat his late work at least offers little for a twenty-first century critical agenda. But if anyone has made a case for the utility of Zizek, it is Jodi Dean. So let’s approach Zizek then in an instrumental way, and see what use Dean puts him to as a tool.

For both Dean and Zizek, “Ideology is what we do, even when we know better.” (5) It s not a theory of false consciousness or even of the interpolation of the subject. In this approach to ideology, closer to Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness. It is about the gap between thought and action rather than thinking the ‘wrong’ thing.

The key motif in Dean’s thought here is the decline in symbolic efficiency, also known as the collapse of the Big Other. These Lacanian phrases point to a growing impossibility of anchoring meaning or of totalizing it. Nobody is able to speak from a position that secures the sliding, proliferating chains of signification.

One could question this thesis on both historical or sociological grounds. Perhaps the stability of meaning is only ever secured by force. When I studied Vaneigem’s account of heresies in Excommunication, or Andrey Platonov’s account of popular speech under Stalinism in Molecular Red, these looked to me like the decline in symbolic efficiency already, and in both cases consistency was only secured by force.

Moving from an historical to a sociological axis, one might then look for where force is applied. In the United States that might include the red purge, the imprisonment and assassination of Black power and the now global campaign to murder the ideological enemies of the United States via death by drone. Perhaps there’s no Master’s discourse at all without force. The same would apply on a more day to day scale with domestic violence and police murder.

There might certainly be particular instances of the decline in symbolic efficiency, when the function of the Master signifier is suspended, when there is no outside authority to tell us what to do, what to desire, what to believe, and where the result isn’t freedom but rather a kind of suffocation. Dean gives the example of Second Life, where people are free to have their avatars do anything, and that ends up being building real estate, shopping and weird sex stuff. Tumblr might be another example, where being free from the Master signifier seems to mean putting together random collages of pictures and greeting card quotations.

The Master signifier depends on virtuality. It is not just another sign in a chain of signs, but a potential for signification as such, a way to project across the gap between fantasy and the real. Interestingly, where for Paolo Virno the virtual ends up sustaining history as a theological premise, here the virtual is theology as historical premise, as that which declines, taking the possibility of desire with it from the world.

Without the Master signifier, there’s no reason to stay with anything. Bonds can be dissolved at no cost. There’s a dissolution of the link between fantasy and reality, and a foreclosure of the symbolic. It is the gaps in the symbolic that allow access to the real, but those gaps are foreclosed, resulting in non-desire, non-meaning, and in the saturation in enjoyment. We are caught in short, recursive loops that attempt to directly provide enjoyment, but which just repeat over and over again its impossibility.

This kind of recursive or reflexive loop in which the subject is trapped applies to the world of objects too in communicative capitalism. Dean mentions climate change, but the Anthropocene more generally, or what Marx called metabolic rift might be symptoms of such loops in operation, in which positive feedback dominates, with the result that more is more. The capture of both objects and subjects just keeps deepening and expanding. Dean: “More circuits, more loops, more spoils for the first, strongest, richest, fastest, biggest.” (13)

How the hell did it come to this? Dean builds on the work of our mutual friend Fred Turner, whose From Counterculture to Cyberculture tracks the construction of what Richard Barbrook calls the California Ideology. How did computing and information science, which were tools of control and hierarchy, become tools of collaboration and flexibility?

Here I read Fred’s book a little differently to Dean. What I see there is a kind of social and technical field that was always open to different kinds of research and different kinds of result. The wartime laboratory experience in science and engineering was strikingly collaborative, expanding and developing what JD Bernal thought of as the communist practice of real science, and what forRichard Stallman (a red diaper baby) was the commons of hacker practice.

Of course, what the military wanted from such experimental practices was a toolkit for command, control, communication and information, (aka C3I). But even there, flexibility and openness was always one of the objectives. The Air Force’s missile program might have imagined what Paul Edwards calls a closed world of cybernetic control, but the Army wanted tools that could work in the fog and friction of war as flexible, open, adaptive networks. The technology that descended from such academic and military origins was always hybrid and multiform, adaptable in different ways to different kinds of economies, politics and culture, although certainly not infinitely so.

What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to co-adapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the cold war purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engineers as well.

Iris Chang’s account of the fate of Tsien Hsue-Shen in Thread of the Silkworm is only the most absurdist of such stories. This pioneer rocket scientist lost his security clearances for having social ties to people who unbeknownst to him were communists. And so he was deported – to communist China! There be actually became what he never was in America – a highly skilled scientist working for the ‘communist cause’. This is just the most crazy of many thousands of such stories. Those who find the tech world ‘apolitical’ might inquire as to how it was made so thoroughly so.

Hence the California ideology is a product of particular histories, one piece of which is documented so well in Turner – but there are histories. The belief that tech will save the world, that institutions are to be tolerated but not engaged, that rough consensus and running code are all that matter – this is not the only ideology of the tech world. That it became an unusually predominant one is not some naturally occurring phenomena – even though both California ideologies and Dean both tend to think it is. Rather, it is the product of particular struggles in which such an ideology got a powerful assist, firstly from state repression of certain alternatives, and then by corporate patronage of the more business-friendly versions of it.

Dean write about “geeks” (23, 25) as if they were some kind of freemasonry, pretending to be apolitical, but with quiet influence. One might usefully look here to a deeper history of the kind of power the sciences and engineers have had, one not quite covered even by the ever-expanding sense of the ‘political’ now employed. The counter-literature here might include what for me is Bruno Latour’s best work: his historical study of Pasteur, and of the kind of spatially and temporally concentrating power of the laboratory.

As Latour shows, Pasteur’s actual political-politics were fairly conventional and not very interesting, but the way the lab was able to become a form of power is a quite different story. Can we – why not? – even think of this as a class power, which has accrued over time its own field of heterogeneous interests, and which stands in relation to the commodity form as neither capital nor labor even if – like all other classes – it is forced into one or other of those relations.

For Dean the geek, or in my terms the hacker class, is a displaced mediator, something that is pushed aside. But by what? The formal category of mediator covers over the existence of a kind of struggle that is neither purely political or a ‘natural’ result of tech evolution. We still lack a sense of the struggles over the information vector of the late twentieth century, with their partial victories and eventual defeats.

The book is called Blog Theory, and in some ways its strength is its relation – only occasionally signaled – to Dean’s own practice as a blogger. There was a time when I read Dean’s (I Cite) blog religiously, alongside Nina Power, Mark Fisher (k-punk), Lars Iyer (Spurious) and a handful of others who really pioneered a kind of theory-writing in blog form, along side the new kinds of more (post)literary practices of Kate Zambreno and friends.

Blogging also looks like a displaced mediator, a step on the way to the mega-socialized media forms such as Facehooker, as Dean already senses. Dean: “Blogging’s settings… include the decline of symbolic efficiency, the recursive loops of universalized reflexivity, the extreme inequalities that reflexive networks produce, and the operation of displaced mediators at points of critical transition.” (29) Tumblr already existed in 2010 when Dean wrote Blog Theory, but was not quite as perfect an illustration of Dean’s conceptual framework then as it is now. Another name for all this might be the tumblresque.

Such media forms become short loops that lock the subject into repeated attempts at enjoyment, where enjoyment is no longer the lost object of desire but the object of loss itself. All drive is death drive. These reflexive, iterative loops are where we are stuck. Communicative action is not enlightenment. “… what idealists from the Enlightenment through critical and democratic theory, to contemporary techno-utopians theorize as the very form of freedom is actually a mechanism for the generation of extreme inequality and capture.” (30)

This is not even, as in Hiroki Azuma, a return to a kind of human-animal. “The notion of drive counters this immanent naturalism by highlighting the inhuman at the heart of the human…” (31) The all-too-human ability to stick on minor differences and futile distractions drives the human ever further away from its own impossibility.

Communicative capitalism relies on repetition, on suspending narrative, identity, and norms. Framed in those terms, the problem then is to create the possibility of breaking out of the endless short loops of drive. But if anything the tendency is in the other direction. After blogging came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, driving even further into repetition. The culture industries gave way to what I call the vulture industries.

Dean identified the tendency already with blogs. They no longer fill a desire for a way to communicate. Desire is a desire for a desire – that absent thing – whereas a drive is a repetition not of the desire but of the moment of failure to reach it. The virtual dimension disappears.

Blogs had their counterpoint in search engines, as that which knows our desires even when we don’t. With the search engine, one trusts the algorithm; with blogs, one trusts one’s friends. Two kinds of affective response dominate in relation to both. One is hysterical: that’s not it! There must be more! The other is paranoid: someone must be stealing all the data. As it turned out, the former drove people to search and search, blog and blog, all the better for actual agencies – both state and corporate – to indeed steal it all. Here I would stress the asymmetry and struggle over information as a crucial feature of communicative capitalism – which may no longer even be a capitalism, but something worse.

The blog for Dean is not a journal or journalism nor a literary form. It may be something like the letter writing of a pre-modern era, which was meant to be circulated beyond the named addressee. It is a sort of technique of the self, one that installs a gaze that shapes the writer. But there’s an ambiguity as to who the writer is visible to. For Dean, this gaze is not that of the Big Other, but of that other creature of Lacan-speak, the objet petit a. In this version, there is an asymmetry: we are entrapped in a kind of visibility. I see from my point of view but am seen from all points of view. It is as if I am seen by an alien object rather than another person. I receive no messages back specific to me and my identity. Ego formation is blocked.

Dean: “Blogging is a technology uncoupled from the illusion of a core, true, essential and singular self…. In communicative capitalism, the gaze to which one makes oneself visible is a point hidden in an opaque and heterogeneous network. It is not the gaze of the symbolic other of our ego ideal but the more disturbing traumatic gaze of a gap or excess, objet petit a.” (56) Hence I never quite know who I am, even though I take endless online quizzes to try to find out. Which punk rock goddess are you? It turns out I am Kim Gordon. Funny, I thought I was Patti Smith.

The decline in symbolic efficiency is a convergence of the imaginary and the real. It is a world of imaginary identities sustained by the promise of enjoyment rather than a world of symbolic identities residing in the gap where desire desires to desire. Unanchored from the symbolic, and its impossible relation to the Big Other, I become too labile and unstable. It is a world of selves with boundary issues, over-sharing, but also troubled by any signs of the success of others, tripping circuits of envy and schadenfreude. It is not a world of law and transgression but repetition and drive. No more lost object of desire, its all loss itself as object. Blocked desires proliferate as partial drives making quickie loops, disappearing into the nets.

Of courses there are those who would celebrate this kind of (post)subjectivity. It could have been a step towards Guattari’s planet of six billion perverts, all coupling and breaking in desiring machines of wildly proliferating sorts. Dean explores instead the way the decline in symbolic efficiency was framed by Agamben as whatever being. Dean: “whatever being points to new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.” (66) For Agamben, some of this is a good thing, in the dissolution of national identities, for example. His strategy – reminiscent of Baudrillard’s fatal strategy is to push whatever being to its limits.

As every blogger knows, this media is not about reading and interpreting, but about circulating the signs. TL;DR, or “too long, didn’t read,” is the most common response. For Dean, the “whatever” in whatever being is a kind of insolence, a minimal acknowledgement that communication has taken place with no attempt to understand it.

Agamben thinks there might be a way to take back the positive properties of being in language that communicative capitalism expropriates. He looks forward to a planetary refusal of identity, a kind of singularity without identity, perhaps other ways of belonging. Dean: “the beings who would so belong are not subjects in the sense that European philosophy or psychoanalysis might theorize.” (82) To which us card-carrying Deleuzians might respond: so much the worse for psychoanalysis and philosophy!

Dean is disturbed by the apparent lack of antagonism of whatever being. But is it apolitical, or just a phenomena in which differences work out differently, without dialectic? Dean: “I can locate here neither a politics I admire nor any sort of struggle at all. What could motivate whatever beings?” (83) They don’t lack anything. But maybe that’s the point. Of course, whatever being does not evade the state in the way Agamben might have hoped. The capture of metadata enables a recording that does not presuppose classification or identity. The back hole of the masses has been conquered by the algorithm. Their silence speaks volumes.

Agamben thought the extreme alienation of language in spectacle could have an kind of ironic coda, where that very alienation becomes something positive, a being after identity. He actually has a positive way of thinking what for Zizek and Dean is drive. Are whatever being really passive, or just a bit slippery? Why is passivity a bad thing anyway? Maybe there was always something a bit backward looking about Lacan.

In The Freudian Robot, Lydia Liu reads Lacan as reacting against the information science of the postwar years. As Tiziana Terranova shows, this was a period in which questions of texts and meanings were side-stepped by new ways of analyzing information mathematically, as a field of statistical probability. Here I am closer to Terranova in thinking that it is time to rethink strategy on the terrain on information rather than that of meaning. Dean does not: “What’s lost? The ability to distinguish between contestatory and hegemonic speech. Irony. Tonality. Normativity.” (89)

But were these ever more than illusions intellectuals entertained about what was going on in communication? Here I find reading Platonov salutary, as his accounts of the language of early Soviet times is really more one of frequency and repetition rather than a politics of ideology or propaganda. I don’t think the road to strategy necessarily always passes through critique, or through a politics of the subject as formed in the symbolic register. Perhaps the flux between the imaginary and the real is where the human resides most of the time anyway. It is not as if the symbolic has reliably been our friend.

Dean mentions Friedrich Kittler’s cunning reworking of Lacan back into media theory, but I would pause to give it a bit more weight. For Kittler, Lacan’s famous tripartite of imaginary, symbolic and real is actually an effect of a certain moment in the development of media. It was a stage in the evolution ofHaraway’s cyborg, when different technics became the mediating apparatus for different flows of sensation. For Kittler, the imaginary is the screen, the symbolic is the typewriter, and the gramophone is the real. This explains so much of the anxiety of the literate classes: the struggle of the typewriters against the screen, insisting on this or that symbolic order against the self/other fluctuations of screen-generated media, and with the grain of the voice as residual stand-in for the real beyond both. All of which, of course, media ‘convergence’ erases. We’re differently wired cyborgs now.

It is telling that Dean wants to resist the “snares” of cognitive capitalism. (95) Dean: “Every little tweet or comment, every forwarded image or petition, accrues a tiny affective nugget, a little surplus enjoyment, a smidgen of attention that attaches to it, making it stand out from the larger flow before it blends back in.” (95) It is hard not to read it in media terms as an appeal by those invested in one media cyborg apparatus to resist the one that’s replacing it. Of course the new one is part of a political economy of domination and exploitation – but so too was the old mass media apparatus.

Of course there’s things one can tease out of a conceptual frame that puts the emphasis on the subject’s relation to the symbolic order. But I don’t see this as a truly essential theoretical tactic. In many ways I think it more productive to follow Terranova and think about information as a ratio of signal to noise, and beyond that as a kind of dynamics into which one might attempt to intervene with information tactics. This is what the situationists called détournement.

I would want to bring the concept of détournement more fully into relation to the work of both writers, as I think it is a more nuanced way of thinking the montage practices of Terranova’s network culture. For Dean, “The politics that montage suggests is a politics released from the burdens of coherence and consistency.” (104)

But isn’t information politics always about frequency, about the probability of certain information appearing with certain other information, about affective states thereby generated. It is only intellectuals who really think political communication is anything else. Even economics may be not much more than this. In the vectoral age, as Boutang suggests, nobody knows the actual value of anything, so the problem is outsourced to a vast cyborg of plug and play info-filters – some human, some algorithmic.

Such an information ecology has its problems, of course. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. As Debord was already suggesting, the integrated spectacle integrated itself into the reality it was describing, and then ceased to know the difference between the two. We now live in the metabolic rifts produced by the wildly improbably molecular flows this produced, which in turn generates the disintegrating spectacle some call the Anthropocene.

What both Agamben and Dean miss about Debord is that the concept of spectacle was always doubled by that of détournement. This is clear in The Society of the Spectacle, where détournement gets the key last chapter (before the concluding coda). There Debord restates the case for the literary communism he and Gil Wolman first proposed in the 1950s as the avant-garde strategy for the era of spectacle. Détournement is precisely the tactic of treating all information as the commons, and refusing all private property in this domain.

Contra Dean, this has nothing to do with a ‘participatory’ politics at all. It was always about the overthrown of the spectacle as a totality. Nor was Debord really contributing to the undermining of ‘expertise’. On the contrary, he dedicated his Comments to those few on both sides who he thought really had the knowledge to either defend the spectacle – or attack it. The same is the case with the book he helped Sanguinetti write about the Italian spectacle of the 70s – The Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy. He was well aware of the dangers of recuperation back into spectacle. It was indeed one of his major themes. Dean: “The spectacle contains and captures the possibility of the common good.” (112) But this is already the central point of his late work, which is about withdrawal rather than participation.

Of course, détournement itself became coopted. Free information became the basis of a new business model, one that extracts surplus information from free labor. But this means moving détournement on from free data to freeing metadata. This may require not just détournement and critique but actually building different kinds of circuit, even if it is just in the gaps of the current infrastructure.

For the time being, one tactic is just to keep putting into circulation the conjunctions of information that generate the affect of solidarity and the commons. It’s a way of taking advantage of the lateral ‘search’ that the decline of symbolic efficiency, or at least the lack of coercive force maintaining it, affords. There is surely a place for what Dean calls “discipline, sacrifice and delay.” (125) But Rome wasn’t unbuilt in a day, and it may take more than one kind of subject-apparatus cyborg to make a new civilization. The party presupposes a milieu. It is an effect and not a cause. Let’s build a new milieu.

This civilization is over and everyone knows it. One need look no further thanAndrew Ross’ account of environmental justice in Phoenix, Arizona to see the scale on which we have to imagine building another one. That is an organizational problem that calls for all sorts of different solutions to all sorts of problems. There can be no one ‘correct’ critical theory. They are all just tools for addressing parts of a manifold problem. Dean’s work seems well suited to the diagnosis of a certain subjective short-circuit and one possible solution to it.

Strangely enough both Dean and Terranova have a use for the concept of the virtual, but here I would follow Debord and think more in terms of constrained situations and available resources. Both the Lacanians and the Deleuzians, otherwise so opposed, may both be a little too theological for the times.

March 17, 2015

Some scenarios involve techno-fixes like cloud-seeding or new kinds of carbon sinks. Cool tech, usually backed by even cooler entrepreneurs, saves the day -- Iron Man plus Al Gore plus Steve Jobs. In green.

Other scenarios are apocalyptic: blizzards, floods, tsunamis, and droughts; crashing planes; millions of migrants moving from south to north only to be shot at armed borders. The poor fight and starve; the rich enclave themselves in shining domed cities as they document the extinction of charismatic species and convince themselves they aren't next.

And there is climate change as unconscious: the stuff of stress, inconvenience, anxiety, and repression; the relief at not having to manage anymore; the enjoyment of change, destruction, and punishment. There will be a last judgment after all. Here those of us who follow the reports of emissions, temperature increases, and political failure get to enjoy being in the know, being those with access to the truth. We can't do anything about it, but we can judge everyone else for their blind, consumerist pleasures. We can name our new era, marking our impact as the Anthropocene (hey, we have changed the world after all.) Anticipatory Cassandras, we can watch from within our melancholic "pre-loss," to use Naomi Klein's term, comforted at least by the fantasy of our future capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so.

The hardest thing is doing something about it. Coming together. Fighting against the multiple centrifugal forces that have produced us as individuals preoccupied with our particular freedoms, preferences, conveniences, and choices. It's no wonder in this setting that market approaches to climate change have appeared as popular options. They affirm the selves we've become and promise to solve the problems all in one new light-bulb or electronic car.

Some of our present difficulty comes from the challenge of imagining a better future. Does it involve a kind of re-peasantization? The elimination of all industry, of all the advantages accrued to some of us under late capitalism? Or is it closer to what we have now, but with windmills and bicycles, the Dutchification of everything? Or is it really not that big a deal at all, a few tweaks here and there so that society looks pretty much like it did in the 70s (Taxi Driver? New York told to drop dead?).

Naomi Klein's bold attempt in This Changes Everything is to take up the challenge of creating an alternative to the grim inequalities of our present trajectory by using climate change as a frame for galvanizing left politics. What the economic crises of the seventies and eighties were for the right (opportunities to deepen and extend neoliberalism), climate change can be for the left (an opportunity to "pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty"). If the left fails to take this opportunity, that is, if we don't take advantage of the "existential urgency" that climate change provides to develop a more focused left strategy, we are doomed to "climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism--profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders" etc (154). What we need, she tells us, is a People's Shock.

could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deal and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights -- all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. (7)

Just as Marx and Engels linked communism to the workers movement, making communism the mission of the working class, so does Klein link a vision of a progressive future to the climate movement. If the only way to eliminate the exploitation of the workers is the abolition of capitalism, the only to eliminate the exploitation of the planet is .... multiple, dispersed activities combined within a diffuse policy framework oriented toward long-term planning and inspired by an essentialist, overly romantic vision of locality, indigeneity, and democracy (that is to say, populism).

Klein's attempt to make climate change the basis for a stronger left politics is a crucial political move. But she weakens it. She fails to see it through. At the site of this failure is a red hole, a missing communism that distorts her vision. She invokes radical politics, but ultimately pulls back into the formula of the alter-globalization movement: in a movement of movements, multiple communities can solve their problems democratically.

Klein presents the "core problem" preventing adequate response to climate change as "the stranglehold of market logic" and "unfettered corporate power." She says that "our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life." (21) We are in the midst of a battle between capitalism and the planet. If capitalism wins, and at this point it is winning, extremely dangerous warming will lock-in, threatening the habitability of the planet. What is to be done? We have to change everything.

Everything rides on how we understand "everything." Klein seems to understand it in terms of neoliberalism, where neoliberalism involves privatization, deregulation of the corporate sphere, lowering of taxes within a broader setting of global trade. By rendering the problem in terms of neoliberalism, she doesn't have to advocate the abolition of capitalism, even when her arguments tend in that direction. So her solution is a kind of global Green Keynesianism, a step back into the time before neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state. It is hard to say exactly what Klein has in mind, though, since she offers so many options in a giant menu of change. It's like she thinks "everything" should be on the table and we (each "community") should be able to pick what we want (perhaps in a truer, more democratic market).

Klein's sense of "everything" is limited by the absence of a communist alternative. For example, even as she criticizes market fundamentalism, she sometimes seems fully ensconced in it. She wants to "buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby" (349). But if we have to change everything, why not just nationalize the fossil fuel industries and undertake a 5-10 year process of dismantling them? Or why not nationally fund clean energy and inject so many taxes and regulations into the carbon economy that it withers away? It's like Klein feels so fully trapped within the economic system we have that she can't break free even as she insists we must break free. There has been and still is a name for this break -- communism.

Some of the components of Klein's new Green Keynesianism would likely include: a carefully planned economy; basic annual income; big public sector expenditures; higher taxes on the rich; and tougher business regulations. The Green justification for the higher taxes on the rich is that they are the ones who need to curb their consumption. The big expenditures would include better public transit, energy efficient housing, and changes in land use to encourage local agriculture. Klein also favors doing a lot with taxes, following the "polluter pays" principle applied to corporations and the rich. It was never clear to me who or what was engaged in the long-term planning she advocates and what sort of force these plans would have. I expect that planning would occur on multiple levels. Given Klein's insistence on local, decentralized communities, it also isn't clear to me how the plans would be integrated.

Klein opposes the nationalization of energy. She advocates instead the model of democratically run, community-based utilities -- let a thousand renewable energy providers bloom! She treats this as a project of the commons (her models are Germany and Denmark). Governments provide a national framework within which decentralized, small-scale, local providers supply renewable energy.

Accompanying the core problem of market fundamentalism is a cultural narrative regarding human domination of the earth. This narrative, Klein argues, underlies much of the left as well as the capitalist right. The former Soviet Union, Mao's China, and contemporary extractivist left-wing governments in Latin America are clear examples, but so are trade unions fighting for "dirty" jobs instead of clean ones, and so are any left Keynesians who continue to think in developmentalist terms. In place of this narrative of domination, Klein's Green Keynesianism would emphasize regeneration, "relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world" (182).

How, then, can we make the change we want to see? Not with big Green: "the 'market-based' climate solutions favored by so many foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole" (199). These include consumer-based solutions (buy Green!) as well as carbon trading schemes, and fracking as a clean energy bridge to renewables. In addition to having done little to nothing to lower emissions over the last twenty years, these approaches, she argues, make the problem worse by failing to challenge the hegemony of the market.

Klein has more confidence in the "movement of many movements" that she calls "Blockadia." These include anti-fracking, anti-extractive industry, and pipeline protests all over the world. Klein rightly emphasizes how the contemporary resistance movement is more than a NIMBY struggle. Across multiple sites, activists share the conviction that fossil fuels must remain in the ground. They use local issues (health, safety, livelihood) as instruments for getting at the global problem of climate change.

The struggles of Blockadia are the flip side of the extreme energy boom going on for the last decade (the one with Sarah Palin's tagline, "drill, baby, drill!"). In the US and Canada, this boom has made more visible the war that the fossil fuel industry has long tried to hide, namely, that the carbon economy--and the capitalist economy more generally--relies on sacrifice zones. Klein writes:

for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacks political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class (310).

With the "extreme energy frenzy," the sacrifice zone has expanded. More people--and more people in the north and west, in areas formerly privileged enough to think they were entitled to turn their heads--are now in the zone of allowable sacrifice. From the vast reach of the Bakken, Marcellus, and Utica shale plays, to the Alberta tar sands, to the continent crossing pipelines, to deep-water oil rigs, to the exploding bomb trains, the intensification of the carbon economy has extended the range of expendable people and places.

Although Klein doesn't use these terms, climate change makes clear the scale of expropriation underpinning the carbon economy. The surplus value captured by the top-- by the owners, shareholders, and executives of the fossil fuel industry -- is expropriated not just from the workers in the industry (which it is), and not just from those living nearby (which it is), but from those living hundreds and thousands of miles away (which is a characteristic also of nuclear power). "Sacrifice zone" has the capacity to be a key concept for knitting together anti-capitalist and climate struggles.

It's correlative concept could then be the "commons." For example, we would want to eliminate sacrifice zones and treat the entire planet as a commons. Having disallowed communism, Klein can't get us to this point. More specifically, in the place in her argument where Klein could -- and should -- point to an internationalist egalitarian vision such as that championed by communists she appeals to a vague notion of democracy understood as multiplicity combined with a romantic vision of indigenous people. This combination embeds unresolved tensions in her argument.

The first problem is the equation of the Blockadia movements with a struggle for democracy. Klein writes: this emergent network of resistance is "driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival--the health of the water, air, and soil" (295) and "the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin" (309). Klein displaces particular struggles (pipeline, fracking, climate) into the political field rather than seeing how the struggles themselves change the field by contesting its terms. Most of the time, activist groups aren't majorities. They are small groups trying to force a position and bring more people over to their side -- as well they should!

Additionally, Klein implies that communities are somehow unified and that they encounter an external force (state or corporation) that is violently extracting resources from them. But division goes all the way through communities. The communities themselves are divided. The deadlocked political system that we have is both a cause and an effect of this division. Marxists refer to this division as class conflict (which works well enough if we have a loose understanding of 'class'). By omitting the constitutive place of division, Klein can suggest that community sovereignty is a goal, again, as if the community were united against fossil fuels -- but the fact that we are not united is precisely the problem the book, and the movement, encounters.

To use a local example, in the battle against the expansion of methane gas storage and LPG storage in the fragile salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the Town of Reading -- where the facility is located -- endorses the gas storage plan. Schuyler County -- where the facility is located -- also supports the plan, although the vote came down to 1 person in their local board and the community is clearly divided. All the other counties surrounding the lake oppose the plan, but most of this opposition came from votes by city or county boards after petitions from activists. The state is considering the issues, and will make a decision. The federal government has already agreed to let the methane storage proceed, but might reconsider. Which level counts as the community? Why? And what sense does this make in a global setting? No one involved has said that the process has not been democratic. This is what democracy looks like. We just don't think it has yielded the right outcome.

The second problem is Klein's association of communities with indigeneity and land. Klein writes, "communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life" (309). Here again she denies division, as if everyone in a community agreed on what constituted a threat, as if they were all similarly situated against a threat, as if they were never too deluded, tired, or exploited to defend themselves, as if they could never themselves constitute a threat to themselves. Cities, towns, states, and regions make bad decisions all the time; they stimulate industries that destroy them. Klein, though, has something else in mind, "a ferocious love" that "no amount of money can extinguish." She associates this love "with an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice." She continues, "And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia's defining feature" (342).

Participants in my seminar found this description racist or fascist. Even though this is not Klein's intent, her rhetoric deploys a set of myths regarding nature, and some people's relation to nature, that make some people closer to nature (and further from civilization) than others. It also justifies an intense defense of blood and soil on the part of one group's attachment to a place such that others become foreign, invaders, rightly excluded as threats to our way of life, our cultural identity. Given that climate change is already leading to increased migration and immigration and that the US and Europe are already responding by militarizing borders, a language of cultural defense and ties to the land is exactly what we don't need in a global movement for climate justice.

Klein's argument, though, gets worse as it juxtaposes indigenous people's love of place with the "extreme rootlessness" of the fossil fuel workforce. These "highly mobile" pipefitters, miners, engineers, and big rig drivers produce a culture of transience, even when they "may stay for decades and raise their kids" in a place. The language of rootless echoes with descriptions of cosmopolitan Jews, intellectuals, and communists. Some are always foreign elements threatening our way of life.

In contrast, I imagine climate politics as breaking the link between place and identity. To address climate change, we have to treat the world itself as a commons and build institutions adequate to the task of managing it. I don't have a clear idea as to what these institutions would look like. But the idea that no one is entitled to any place seems better to me as an ethos for a red-green coalition. It requires us to be accountable to every place.

I should wrap this up. The final tension I want to address comes in Klein's conclusion, as she emphasizes mass social movements. Invoking the abolition movement, Klein is inspiring, properly crediting Chris Hayes for his influential Nation article linking climate change and the emancipation of the slaves in the US. Nonetheless, her argument is strange. She calls for societal transformation but refuses the term "revolution." Throughout the book, she has said that we are running out of time to stop a warming trend so severe as to destroy civilization as we know it if not eliminate the human species altogether. She invokes Brad Werner's famous paper announcing that earth is basically fucked. But she writes:

And let's take it for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don't have much to offer in the way of roadmaps (450).

This lets her completely discount the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, as if there is nothing to learn from any of the large scale organizing undertaken by communists, socialists, wobblies, and unionists. Her model for the left thus relies on extracting from the left a central component of our history. Frankly, at the level of tactics alone, this is a bad call: why sign on to a political project premised on the rejection of working class achievements (a move which repeats a ubiquitous gesture of erasure since 1989). Wouldn't incorporating these achievements be fundamental to any effort to reinvent "the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect" (460)? Klein is trying to open up a collective desire for collectivity, but without communism.

It is also without revolution, which Klein dismisses as vanguardist, as if her Blockadians weren't themselves at the vanguard of climate struggle. But what does it mean to reject revolution? If the movements are mobilized as she suggests, what will stop them? What would block or hinder the people after they are moving? Perhaps the state, since Klein hasn't said anything about seizing it. Perhaps each other, since she thinks of us as divided into local communities. Perhaps the capitalist system, since she hasn't called for its abolition. Or perhaps this isn't the worry, since we are unlikely to be mobilized enough in time at all -- and for enough of us in the north, that will be okay, at least for a while.

March 06, 2014

Lethem has given communism a body where we can again feel its beating heart. Even more, he lets us sense the continued vibrancy of communist desire on the left despite the absence of a party. An insistent longing that refuses to reduce the world to what we are given infuses movements, impulses, theories, and acts that would otherwise appear as just so many singular instances. In the brilliance of Lethem’s writing, American communists endure without apology or shame, with beliefs that exist “in the space between one person and another, secret sympathies of the body. Alliances among those enduring the world.” For communists, living fully connected to the immensity of the human struggle for equality and justice means that disappointment and desire carry one another. What Lethem grasps, what he takes back from anti-communist propagandists, is how the epic subsumes the everyday. It doesn’t devour it. It infuses it, tying together the fragmented feelings and moments of embodied life.

Lethem has given communism a body where we can again feel its beating heart. Even more, he lets us sense the continued vibrancy of communist desire on the left despite the absence of a party. An insistent longing that refuses to reduce the world to what we are given infuses movements, impulses, theories, and acts that would otherwise appear as just so many singular instances. In the brilliance of Lethem’s writing, American communists endure without apology or shame, with beliefs that exist “in the space between one person and another, secret sympathies of the body. Alliances among those enduring the world.” For communists, living fully connected to the immensity of the human struggle for equality and justice means that disappointment and desire carry one another. What Lethem grasps, what he takes back from anti-communist propagandists, is how the epic subsumes the everyday. It doesn’t devour it. It infuses it, tying together the fragmented feelings and moments of embodied life.

Lethem has given communism a body where we can again feel its beating heart. Even more, he lets us sense the continued vibrancy of communist desire on the left despite the absence of a party. An insistent longing that refuses to reduce the world to what we are given infuses movements, impulses, theories, and acts that would otherwise appear as just so many singular instances. In the brilliance of Lethem’s writing, American communists endure without apology or shame, with beliefs that exist “in the space between one person and another, secret sympathies of the body. Alliances among those enduring the world.” For communists, living fully connected to the immensity of the human struggle for equality and justice means that disappointment and desire carry one another. What Lethem grasps, what he takes back from anti-communist propagandists, is how the epic subsumes the everyday. It doesn’t devour it. It infuses it, tying together the fragmented feelings and moments of embodied life.

October 28, 2013

Jennifer M. Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013) contributes to our understanding of the impact of forty years of neoliberalism on poor and working people in the US, the extreme perniciousness of the individual form, and the erosion of solidarity. Silva writes: "experiences of powerlessness, confusion, and betrayal within the labor market, institutions such as education and the government, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help at their peril. They are learning the hard way that being an adult means trusting no one by yourself."

Silva frames her book in terms of adulthood: what are the markers of adulthood for the post-industrial working class? This is an important question: since 2009, about half of people between the ages of 18-24 live with their parents. Ever-increasing numbers of working people are postponing or forgoing marriage. Ever-more are pushed into "flexibile" work-lives such that they move in and out of the paid work-force under conditions increasingly disadvantageous to labor. The markers of successful adulthood have thus changed since the 50s and 60s when adult life was characterized by a set of basic, achievable steps: finish high school, get a job, get married, get a house, have kids. Contemporary capitalism has pushed even these basic milestones out of the reach of most working-class people. So, how do they narrate their lives? Silva argues that they focus on themselves, telling a story of personal triumph over adversity. They position themselves as isolated and alone, betrayed and abandoned by all the institutions around them. Absorbing a narrative that integrates neoliberal individualism with therapeutic self-discovery and self-help ("no one can help me but me"), they make the self the primary locus of struggle and achievement. Failure is no one's fault but your own. Success is successful grappling with one's inner life, the trauma of neglect and abuse, and the ability to overcome that by working on oneself. The failure of others is thus their own fault. As one informant said, the biggest obstacle she faces is her own self.

The book comes from interviews with a hundred young working-class people in Massachusetts and Virginia from 2008-2010. Silva's analysis is attentive to race, gender, and sexual orientation, astutely observing "that without a broad, shared vision of economic justic, race, class, and gender have become sites of resentment and division rather than a coalition among the working class." Interview subjects ("informants") were men and women between 24 and 34. Most work in the service sector. About a third live with their parents or other older family member. Not quite half have high school degrees; a little over a quarter have some college. Most have significant debt. Most have trouble locating or keeping a job capable of sustaining them (paying rent, expenses, debt).

Silva outlines an emerging working-class adult self that has "low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health." They don't think about their lives in collective terms. They think about them in terms of recovery from painful personal pasts. Absent work as a source of self-respect and self-worth, they "remake dignity and meaning out of emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation."

The primary characteristics of the emerging working-class adult self are rugged individualism and distrust. People are reluctant to pour time, emotion, and energy into relationships that are risky. Although Silva emphasizes the impact on romantic relationships, we can extend this to a broader unwillingness to attach oneself to groups and causes. An inability to commit is an effect of economic insecurity that makes political organization as challenging and precarious as romantic association -- it's hard to know whether or not it's worth it; for many, past experience suggests that it won't be, that they most likely outcome is betrayal. Silva notes the foundational belief in self-reliance among African Americans in her study as they narrate their experiences in terms of their own individual experiences rather than in terms of the structural impact of racism. Solidarity, social trust, and community engagment plumment as the primary worldview conceives rights in terms of "'I's' rather than 'we's', with economic justice dropped out of their collective vocabulary."

Neoliberalism configures the working class self. Oprah, self-help books, therapy world -- these provide tools for people faced with pressures of flexibilization to cope with frequent change. Silva effectively illuminates the material conditions underlying contemporary culture's preoccupation with making and remaking one's individual identity. She writes, "The need to continuously recreate one's identity--whether after a failed attempt at college or an unanticipated divorce or a sudden career change--can be an anxiety-producing endeavor." Therapy offers a culture resource for ascribinging meaning to one's life in a world in flux. The individual self is both constant and maleable, a site for both continuity and change, made possible through a therapy culture that locates problems in individual pathology, inserts these pathologies into a specific individual past, and makes bearing witness to one's own suffering into a ground for a transformation confined to the self. "The sources of meaning and dignity--hard work, social solidarity, family--found in previous studies of the industrial working class had been nearly eclipsed by an all-encompassing culture of emotional self-management." The way working class people deal with upheaval, recession, and unemployment is by fostering flexibility within themselves, making themselves into adaptable beings detached from the outer world.

In a powerful and disturbing chapter on the hardening of working class individualism, Silva describes interview subjects' defense of big business and hostility toward affirmative action. The emotion underlying their neoliberal subjectivity is betrayal. These working class people feel the market to be impersonal, a matter of risk and chance. When government intervenes, it does so in ways that rig the game so that they can't compete. Furthermore, since so many have had to struggle on their own, by themselves, in contexts of poverty and diminishing opportunity, they take the fact of their survival as itself the morally significant fact: making it on one's own is what bestows dignity. Socialists like Obama thus take away their last best thing, the special something that is all they have left (this is my language), namely, the dignity they have precisely because they are completely self-reliant. Indeed, Silva's account suggests that solidarity is a problem because to embrace it would be to acknowledge one's insufficiency as an individual, one's inability to survive alone. Hence, working people are hostile to those below them on the food chain who need help from others because this hostility enables them to project neediness onto others thereby enabling themselves to shore up a fragile and impossible individuality.

Silva argues that young working-class people have learned that they can't rely on anyone. They try to numb their sense of betrayal by affirming the worst cultural scripts of individualism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance, hardening themselves to the world around them and thus becoming precisely the subjects neoliberalism needs insofar as they are hostile to various forms of government intervention, particularly affirmative action. It might be, then, that the sorts of critical exposes we on the left write and circulate, the stories of governmental corruption and the university failure, aren't helping our cause at all. Instead, they are affirming what the working class already knows to be true: they are being betrayed.

Silva's insight into the link between neoliberalism and individualism points to both the challenge for communist organizing and the possibility of a way forward:

autonomy should be understood a a by-product of an uncertain, competitive, and precarious labor market that forces individuals to navigate their life trajectories on their own in order to survive. That is, the more our futures seem uncertain and unknowable, and the more individualistic we are forced to become, the greater our need to find and express our authentic selves. Paradoxically, the more we are required to construct ourselves as individuals, to write our own biographies, the more we realize our utter inability to control the trajectories of our lives.

This 'utter inability' is a key locus of communist organizing. We have to realize together strength in numbers. And, we have to be able to be for each other not an audience for performances of authentic individuality but a solidary collective where meaning comes from common struggle. If people feel isolated, we have to build connections that prove they are not.

May 09, 2013

Very proud of the students in my seminar on crowd theory. They've compiled their research papers into a book. The chapters span from critical discussions of early crowd theory, investigations into contemporary networked crowds, crowds and urban space, crowd theory and affect theory, and the continuing importance of concepts from crowd theory.

April 10, 2013

Out of the blue I got an advance copy of Jonathan Lethem's new book, Dissident Gardens.

I've never met him, but I used a quote from Chronic City as an epigraph for Blog Theory. Chronic City is probably my favorite novel ever.

Well, Dissident Gardens came with a hand-written, personal card: "Wanted you to have this one early. With admiration, J.L."

The book is about communism!! (So I am guessing that he maybe knows who I am.)

More specifically, from the back copy:

At the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose's suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Acquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.

...

As the decades pass--from the parlor communism of the 30s, McCarythism, the civil rights movement, ragged 70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment--we come to understand through Lethem's extraordinarily vivid stroytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

January 31, 2013

A key line of argumentation in The Freudian Subject attempts to de-sexualize psychoanalytic theory. I appropriate the idea as follows: Freud treats the unconscious as the unconscious of a subject. This leads him to individualize it, to contain it within the individual, as we might say, an ego unconscious. But much of what he discovers can't be contained within the individual. It points to an unconscious that cannot be trapped in a scene or point, an unconscious that moves and shifts. Why is the unconscious this way? I want to argue that it's because the unconscious is a crowd; it's plural, multiple (and so the question remains: is it a still the unconscious of a subject, now understood as a collective subject? or, is it collective but not a subject?) . Freud tries various ways to repress his knowledge of this crowd. One way is with his emphasis on sexuality, which also immediately ties the subject back to others, although in a more singular way, that is, a way delimited by Oedipus. Sex is too limiting (or, in the famous line from Sid and Nancy: sex is boring).

How does Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen develop his argument? In the second section, he reads Freud's discussion of narcissism together with Freud's correspondence (Jung, Fleiss). A key issue: Freud's emphasis on sexuality, particularly in the eliding of the autoerotic body with narcissism that occurs in the correspondence with Jung. This elision is a problem. The autoerotic body is anarchic, ruptured, conflicting (70); this body doesn't merge easily into a narcissism that associates a whole, unified body with an individual, which makes the body into my own body. There is uneasiness and confusion here.

B-J argues that Freud insists on sexuality as a way to give body to narcissism. And, also, as a way to differentiate his view from Jung's even as it had blended and overlapped in a "communism of thought-sharing" in their correspondence. The emphasis on sexuality was, according to B-J, also a (re)institutionalization of "intellectual private property." The explanation of narcissism was a product of a narcissism caught up in mimetic rivalry.

B-J makes a similar argument as he reads Freud's "Psycho-Analytic Notes" together with the Freud-Jung correspondence on the topic of paranoia and homosexuality. For B-J, the issues at stake are much more those of rivalry than sexuality; Freud, however, emphasizes sexuality in the context of his own rivalrous identification with Jung. B-J's argumentation considers the "archesociality" of homosexuality in Freud's account, as well as the tension this causes for Freud's discussion of homosexuality as a threat to sociality. The discussion is intricate. For now, I want to jump to one of the conclusions:

So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would recede sociality (or--and it is the same thing--a sociality that would relate already-constituted subjects to each other. This would be to theorize with delusion, to speculate in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (myself) as the mimetic double . . .desire is mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong into a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it.

It follow that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblances, all mimesis. To recognize that I resemble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire, would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that double who enrages me.

It follows, finally, that narcissicism is violence, and that the ego ...is a gloomy tyrant . . . Narcissism is in profound collusion with power--by which we mean tyrannical power, or put another way, political madness--by virtue of its mimetic, rivalrous, (a)social origin . . . 93-94

Affirmation of the ego is violent because it is a wrenching of the ego out of the crowd, the collective, the group of which it is a part. Or, the ego is nothing else but this wrenching, this assertion of self. And it's an assertion doomed to frustration because it depends on the very others it needs to annihilate. The horror of the ego: I am not myself.

B-J says that the violence of the ego is also present at the collective level: "the totalitarianism and imperialism of the 'we' are never anything but the supreme phase of the absolution of the ego, the "I," and they are implied in even the most solitary, most pacific meditations on the ego cogtito."

This does not mean that any collective is totalitarian, only that it risks totalitarianism insofar as they are 'the supreme phase' of the absolution of the ego. But, even in this somewhat watered down version, I wonder if B-J jumps to quickly to make the 'we' nothing but the ego bigger. That, I think, is too fast, particularly given his focus already on the dilemmas of sociality.

I've been reading this in order to get at the primacy of collectivity and a sense of collective desire. At this point, I am afraid that one of the costs of this direction is that the desire at work is violent. The violence, though, I think is the violence of the assertion of the ego. It's a product of mimesis, the operation that let's desire be as the desire of a subject even as it undermines the subject itself; or, desire insofar as creates and threatens an ego.

Fortunately, I think, the chapter ends in a way I need it to: primary narcissism is a myth, present only as already crossed out (101). Or, in my language, it's a symptom of the problems Freud is having enclosing the unconscious or accounting for the emergence of a subject as an ego.

That the subject emerges in and through a primordial fiction is what Freud has been saying from the outset, from the moment he declared ... that 'something' has to form the ego. This has to mean that the ego is nothing--not even amorphous matter, not even a 'fragmented body'--prior to such a formation, prior to such a 'creation.' Thus we have no business speculating about the nature of the ego, the subject, the Narcissus complex, any more than we may presuppose any sort of property or subjective identity. Such identity will always be apocryphal and fictious (but its falseness can no longer be truthfully expressed), inasmuch as there can be no subject except one that is initially modeled on or modeled by (here we have no way of distinguishing activity from passivity, spontaneity from receptivity) something that 'precedes' it. 116

In the beginning were others. We weren't among the others; I wasn't one among them. I emerge from and out of them and the I that emerges will always be to an extent false, fictious, imaginary (B-J, though rejects Lacan's account of the imaginary because 'in the beginning there is no one to see anything at all;' this doesn't seem to me to be necessary because I think they are talking about different stages).

And can we apply this to thinking about a political subject? Perhaps when we note the blurring of active and passive, spontaneous and receptive.

Back to B-J: his point is that Freud's early arguments presuppose the ego and the arguments in the narcissism essay attempt to solve this problem but fail (resulting in an essay that is unreadable). His very language breaks down.

if the ego is not 'present from the outset,' if it is nothing prior to accepting in (and as) 'itself' a form that comes 'from without,' it follows not only that the relation to the object (to the other, to the 'non-ego') is primary, but also and especially that this first relation cannot have been a specular relation, nor even, ultimately, a relation at all.

The ego can't emerge by looking because that assumes that there is something that is looking; it can't emerge via an object relation, because that assumes a separate ego that can be in this relation.

Where the ego forms itself in the image of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of 'form' or 'image,' either of 'self' or 'other.' Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the 'I" arrives. And the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenomenality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage becomes a beyond-stage, a fore-stage of the primary mimesis. 118

Freud's attempts to explain the ego ideal and ideal ego, whether via introjection and internalization or projection flounder on the same problem: positing an ego before the one the origins of which he is trying to describe. Freud only 'solves' the problem by shifting it to another level.

How are we to explain that an ego (fragment) assimilates (itself) (to) the other and thereby forms itself? That it begins by incarnating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That it emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That t emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) the other, the object? These are inevitable, and inevitably hopeless, questions, as long as continue to posit a preformed, ready-made ego. For it is not clear why such an ego would need to identify itself, even "partially," with an ideal imposed from without, or why it would desire to submit to the law that imposed imitation. If the subject is "at the beginning," why would it subject itself? 124

As B-J explains, this the problematic of the second topography Freud introduces in the 1920s:

How can we conceive of that strange figure of an ego that forms its ideal in its own image and forms itself in the image of its ideal, that projects itself in the ideal and introjects the ideal, that identifies the ideal with itself and itself with the ideal? 125

I think the answer has to turn on the crowd. And, the final chapter of the book thus focuses on the primal band.